Embedded FPGA-based control of the HIT/DLR hand

In this paper, we developed a performance-enhanced, stand-alone dexterous robot hand with effective mechanical structure and lightweight control hardware. In the context, the paper shows the design methodology of HIT/DLR dexterous robot hand II controller using FPGA (field programmable gate array). Lower level controller is implemented in an FPGA and higher level controller is implemented in a DSP. Instead of a conventional architecture, a FPGA-based soft processor core is utilized. It includes a set of custom peripheral cores, such as data collection, brushless DC motors control and communication with palm's FPGA by point-to-point serial communication (PPSeCo). FPGAs make modular fingers more versatile, adding some new features to the design of hand like real-time control, hardware reuse, lower cost, fault-recovering, and software/hardware co-design. Finger control system use the NIOS soft CPU as hardware platform and uC/OS II real-time operating system as software platform to improve the efficiency of the system and short the responding time of a task. The experiment results clearly illustrate the high performance of the control system